Kingdom of León

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Reino de León / Reinu de Llïón
Kingdom of León

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910 – 1230

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Coat of arms

Kingdom of León, 1030

Capital

León

Language(s)

Mainly Latin and Astur-Leonese. Also Castellano, Galician, Basque, and Mozarabic.

Religion

Roman Catholicism (Islam, Judaism)

Government

Monarchy

History

- Established

910

- Disestablished

1230

The City of León was founded by the Roman Seventh Legion (for unknown reasons always written as Legio Septima Gemina ("twin seventh legion")^{[citation needed]}. It was the headquarters of that legion in the late empire and was a center for trade in gold which was mined at Las Médulas nearby. In 540, the city was conquered by the Arian Visigothic king Liuvigild, who did not harass the already well-established Catholic Christian population. In 717 León fell again, this time to the Moors. However, León was one of the first cities retaken during the reconquest and became part of the Kingdom of Asturias in 742. It was a small town, but the surviving Roman walls bear the medieval walling upon them.

[edit] Emergence of the Kingdom

In 913, an independent Kingdom of León was founded when the Christian princes of Asturias along the northern coast of the peninsula shifted their main seat from Oviedo to the city of León. In doing so, they turned their backs on the unnavigable Atlantic Ocean, infested with Vikings at the time, and settled in the meseta, the high tableland of central Spain, a historic shift.

Almost immediately, León began to expand to the south and east, securing the newly gained territory with numerous castles. The newly added area was the County of Burgos until the 930s, at which time count Fernan Gonzalez of Castile began a campaign to expand Burgos and make it independent and hereditary. He took upon himself the title King of Castile, after the numerous castles in the area, and continued expanding his kingdom at the expense of León by allying with the Caliphate of Cordoba, until 966, when he was stopped by Sancho.

Spanish Christian kingdoms c.925–929; Note that Castile at that time was still a Leónese county rather than an independent kingdom.

Constant rivalry between the two kingdoms opened rifts that could be exploited by outsiders, and Sancho III "the Great" of Navarre (1004–1035) absorbed Castile in the 1020s, and added León in the last year of his life, leaving Galicia to temporary independence. In the division of lands which followed his death, his son Fernando succeeded to the county of Castile. Two years later, in 1037, he conquered León and Galicia. For nearly thirty years, until his death in 1065, he ruled over a combined kingdom of León-Castile as Ferdinand I of León. In these clashes in an impoverished and isolated culture, where salt-making and a blacksmith's forge counted as industries, the armies that decided the fate of the kingdoms numbered in the hundreds of fighting men.

Kingdom of León, 1030"

Directly to the south of León lay the incalculably rich, sophisticated and powerful Caliphate of Cordoba, like a Western Byzantium. Internal dissensions divided Andalusian loyalties in the 11th century, so that the impoverished Christians who had been sending tribute to the Caliphate, found themselves in a position to demand payments (parias) instead, in return for favours to particular factions or as simple extortion.

Thus, though scarcely influenced by the culture of the successor territories of the former Caliphate, Ferdinand I followed the example of the counts of Barcelona and the kings of Aragon, and he became hugely wealthy from its gold coinage. When he died in 1065, his territories and the parias were split among his three sons, of whom Garcia emerged the victor, in the classic fratricidal strife common to feudal successions.

Few in Europe would have known of this immense new wealth in a kingdom so isolated that its bishops had virtually no contact with Rome, except that Ferdinand and his heirs (the kings of León-Castile) became the greatest benefactors of the Abbey of Cluny, where Abbot Hugh (died 1109) undertook construction of the huge third abbey church, the cynosure of every eye. The Way of Saint James called pilgrims from Western Europe to the supposed tomb of Saint James the Great in Santiago de Compostela, and the large hostels and churches along the route, encouraged building in the Romanesque style.

The taking of Toledo (May 6, 1085) by Alfonso VI was a turning point in the development of León-Castile and the first major milestone in the Reconquista. Christian Mozarabs from Al-Andalus had come north to populate the deserted frontier lands, and the traditional view of Spanish history has been that they brought with them the remains of Visigothic and Classical culture, and a new ideology of Reconquista, a crusade against the Moors. Modern historians see the fall of Toledo as marking a basic change in relations with the Moorish south, turning from extortion of annual tribute to territorial expansion. Alfonso was drawn into local politics by strife within Toledo. He then found himself faced with the unfamiliar problems of settling garrisons in the small Muslim strongholds dependent on Toledo (which had fallen to him with the city) and the appointment of a Catholic bishop. Revised definitions of the role of a Catholic king faced with the independent Muslim client-states that bought him off with gold had to be resolved in timely fashion by a Catholic king now governing sophisticated urban Muslim subjects.

The two kingdoms of León and Castile were split again around 1195, when a major defeat of Alfonso VIII weakened the authority of Castile, but the lands were reunited in 1230 under Ferdinand III. The Atlantic coastal province separated as the independent Kingdom of Portugal.

Kingdom of León, 1210

Though later kings of Castile continued to take the title King of León as the superior title, and to use a lion as part of their standard, power in fact became centralized in Castile, as exemplified by the Astur-Leónese language's replacement by Castilian.

In the 16th century, León became a captaincy-general under a formally unified Spanish kingdom. The modern province of León was founded in 1833. The former lands of León are now part of the autonomous communities of Castile and León, Galicia, Extremadura, Asturias and of the country of Portugal.